52 pages • 1 hour read
E. L. DoctorowThe Book of Daniel
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1971A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Literature and Authors
The title The Book of Daniel invokes several literary associations: the Biblical Book of Daniel, the book that Daniel is writing about his family that forms much of the narrative, and Daniel’s consciousness of his role as both an author and a character. The Biblical Book of Daniel for which the novel is named hints at the egotism at the heart of protagonist Daniel’s relationship with other books. The Book of Daniel tells the story of the Jewish prophet Daniel, who is taken hostage after Jerusalem falls to the Babylonians. Daniel wins influence at court when he successfully interprets Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar’s dreams. Much of the rest of the book consists of Daniel’s prophetic visions. The Biblical Daniel’s role as a prophet trapped in the enemy’s court parallels Daniel Lewin’s view of himself as the victim of an enemy state, gifted with the ability to interpret the signs of his times if only others would listen. Reflecting his tendency to literary self-aggrandizement, Daniel also puts himself in the company of writers like James Joyce, Walt Whitman, and Allen Ginsberg, all of whom wrote, directly or indirectly, about themselves. Daniel is a pretentious, intellectual man, and he considers himself worthy of the respect and intellectual scrutiny such writers receive, perhaps even the reverence of a prophet like the Biblical Daniel. His role as the narrator, in this context, symbolizes his desire to be taken seriously. He strives to understand himself but hopes that intellectuals and world leaders might also deem him worthy of understanding.
References to Jewish literary figures such as Leopold Bloom also suggest Daniel’s desire to insert himself in a particular pantheon. Leopold Bloom, the protagonist of Ulysses by James Joyce, is an introspective man who struggles with his own identity in a world that he is convinced is against him. Daniel writes himself into his novel as a man in Bloom’s mold: he wants to be seen as a tragic figure, a nuanced person who deserves sympathy from the audience. Daniel is smart enough to know that Bloom’s pathos derives from the candid way he is presented to the audience. Joyce shows Bloom in his lowest moments, as well as at his best. Daniel does not shy away from his own flaws and uses the narrative as a confessional tool in which he admits to abusing his wife and having incestuous thoughts about his sister. Daniel is desperate for the audience to treat him with the same empathy extended to Bloom. How he presents the Bloom reference, however, suggests that he is not sure of receiving this empathy. The Bloom reference occurs in isolation, without analysis or context. Daniel is paying lip service to the type of literary figure he wants to be. The contextless, cloying way in which he presents such references symbolizes both his shallowness and his desperate need to be loved.
In this way, the literature The Book of Daniel references offers insights into its protagonist. Daniel wants to be taken seriously, he wants to be loved, and he wants to be considered with reverence as a prophet or a martyr. Daniel’s relationship with literature symbolizes the space in his heart. The Book of Daniel is itself a symbol of Daniel’s urgent need to fill this hole. Whether evoking Biblical heroes or projecting onto more famous Jewish characters, Daniel hopes to use the idea of literature to demonstrate to the audience why his story and his character deserve sympathy.
Media
Daniel is highly conscious of the role that mass media plays in American society. From a young age, his father teaches him that media is a form of indoctrination. Paul describes the advertisements in magazines and scours the packaging of products, seeking to describe to Daniel the ways such images manipulate people. He is not alone in his beliefs. Later in his life, Daniel listens to Artie talk at length about the role media plays in conditioning people to live in a capitalist society. They turn to consumerism to soothe the alienation that they cannot describe, he says. Since Artie is keenly aware of the role media plays in propping up the capitalist state, he seeks to invert this relationship and turn media for his own purposes. He wants to use mass media to invoke a revolution, based on the same advertising and commercial principles as used by capitalist society to sell products. Artie decides that revolution is a product and that he can use the media to become its salesman. This understanding of media as a tool of social control and consumerism echoes across generations, from Paul to Artie, with Daniel as the witness.
Since media is so prominent in Paul’s lessons to Daniel about consumerism, his day job is ironic. Paul is a radio repairman. While Paul was instructing his son on the dangers of media and advertisements, he was repairing the very devices that distributed the media to the masses. Paul’s work ensured that even the poorest people had access to the media which indoctrinated them to support the economic system that he loathed. At the same time, however, Paul believed himself to be an honest businessman. He charged as little as he could, providing his services as a form of social benefit for his fellow working-class people. Through talking to them, he hoped to change their minds. He wanted to use his business as a model for social change, to broadcast his communist ideals to people who, he believed, would genuinely benefit from this economic change. Paul may have helped the media reach more people, but he wanted to ensure that he provided an example to other people that capitalism was not the only option. Paul’s business symbolizes how an individual’s relationship to media can become revolutionary. Paul used radio repair as praxis, just as Artie wants to use commercials for revolution. The inherent contradictions in their plans foreshadow their inevitable failure, but they symbolize how individuals’ relationships with the media can be more nuanced than simply falling victim to propaganda.
The media also plays an important role in the Isaacsons’ trial. Daniel steals newspapers to learn more about the trial and, in doing so, he realizes the extent to which the institutions of his society loathe Paul and Rochelle. These media outlets tell a very different story about Paul and Rochelle from the one that Daniel has experienced firsthand. This is Daniel’s introduction to the post-modernist idea that there is no objective truth. The newspapers and Daniel have different subjective understandings of his parents. The contrast between the stories being told symbolizes the impossibility of objective truth, even as Daniel strives to retroactively construct something of the sort. That the trial by media ends in execution, however, demonstrates the imbalance of power. While there may be no objective truth, the media’s outsized influence means that, as an institution, they can construct a version of reality that has dire consequences.
The Electric Chair
Paul and Rochelle are executed by electric chair midway through the novel. Daniel is very clear that he does not believe that the electric chair was true closure to his parents’ story. By the time Daniel is writing his dissertation in 1967, doubts are being cast over the validity of the judgment. An article in The New York Times reassesses the validity of the Isaacsons’ death penalty, blaming the culture of paranoia that was extant in the United States at the time. For the general public, the electric chair becomes a symbol of an unjust society, a misuse of state power, and a rallying point for future generations of radicals.
For Daniel, what the electric chair symbolizes is more complicated. The scenes in which Paul and then Rochelle are executed are preceded by Daniel directly addressing his audience. He insists that he is not shying away from his responsibilities as a narrator. Despite the wealth of evidence in the rest of the story that their deaths have traumatized Daniel, he declares that he has no problem in describing the electric chair. Daniel begins with a description of the technical details of the chair’s power consumption and its abilities. His descriptions of the technical details of the electric chair symbolize his desire to exert control over the most traumatic moment of his life. He may not be able to control the actual chair, but he can control the flow of information and the way his reader understands his narrative relationship to the electric chair. This need for control says more about Daniel than about the chair or his parents. His careful, insistent portrayal of the scene has the tone and manner of a therapy session, representing Daniel’s reclaiming of agency over the horrors of his past.
His parents’ final moments in life also confirm for Daniel their key traits. Throughout the novel, he has praised his mother’s strength, pragmatism, and defiance. After her rebellious last words, she survives the first electrocution and must be shocked again. Daniel was not in the room, so he pieces together the narrative through an assortment of reports, eyewitness accounts, and his own memories of his parents. In this way, the verisimilitude of the scene is irrelevant. The fact that his mother survived the first attempt to execute her fits Daniel’s understanding of her personality, helping him build his understanding of her and the life she lived.
Related Titles
By E. L. Doctorow
